Search results for ""out-spoken press""
Out-Spoken Press Nascent: An Anthology of Emerging BAME Poets
Nascent is a new poetry anthology from Out-Spoken Press showcasing four young, up and coming BAME poets. The book features poems by Jess Rahman-González, Mukahang Limbu, Tice Cin, and Maria-Sophia Christodoulou. The editors aimed to highlight young poets from underrepresented backgrounds in this anthology. Editor Anthony Anaxagorou says: “The poems in Nascent circumnavigate what it means to be young, to feel at times both present and absent in an ever-changing world. They grapple with issues which have had to be encountered way too early in life, and they do so with courage, sophistication and invention.’ “ Jess Rahman-González is a queer, disabled poet and theatre-maker. They are co-parent of Clumsy Bodies, an LGBTQIA, disabled-led art collective. Jess is currently a member of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and playwright-in-residence at DYSPLA. Mukahang Limbu is a 17-year-old Nepalese writer based in Oxford. He is a three-time Foyle Young Poet, a SLAMbassador, Oxford Young Writer 2017-18, and has won the First Story National competition. His poems have been published in England: Poems from a School, an anthology written by migrants. He was the recipient of the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry 2019. Tice Cin is a poet and writer from Tottenham, North London. An alumnus of Barbican Young Poets, her work has been commissioned by venues including St Paul’s Cathedral and Battersea Arts Centre. A Literary Fiction awardee for Spread The Word’s London Writers Awards scheme, she is currently finishing her first novel. Maria-Sophia Christodoulou is a London based poet, completing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her family originate from Cyprus where the hybridity of culture and tradition greatly influence her work. She will be pursuing a career in teaching English Literature in schools, where she hopes to make writing and performing poetry a stronger part of the curriculum.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press The Neighbourhood
What is a neighbour? What makes a community? In this themed collection, Hannah Lowe focuses on the urban places she knows and loves, and finds a rich complexity of neighbourliness under the extreme pressure. These poems look urgently into the future, into communities bearing the weight of austerity and gentrification, where global struggles manifest in the local. Nowhere is more at stake than the circle of home the author draws around her infant son, who must learn the fragile meanings of the neighbourhood.
£7.02
Out-Spoken Press Somewhere Something is Burning
An examination of solitude and absence, the poems within this collection grapple with the reality and taboo of loneliness pitted against an anxiety of connecting. Exploring human relationships, breakdown in communication, and silence – self-inflicted or otherwise – the poems give voice to the fears and experiences that shape us, and interrogate the ways in which we process and avoid. Frecknall’s leaps of surreality, extreme empathy and vivid imagery make Somewhere Something is Burning a compelling joyride of a read.
£10.00
Out-Spoken Press sad thing angry
sad thing angry is an expression of the inexpressible: the fracturing of a relationship with living.In this unique and brilliant debut, Emma Jeremy finds new language to navigate a journey where guilt and hope, grief and isolation live side by side. In a voice that’s both daring and one-of-a-kind, these poems hold a quiet wisdom earned from knowledge delivered too early. This ambitious collection hums with complex feeling, bringing into question what being alive means, when all you can think about is death.“I am a dour and obsessive person and I am in these dour days obsessed with the dour and obsessive sad thing angry by Emma Jeremy. These poems are funny and horrifying, destabilizing, depersonalizing, extremely weird, and so extremely smart. “i should have picked up a lamb many years ago / so as it grew into a sheep / i could have grown stronger,” Jeremy writes with characteristic twistiness. For this and other important regrets, I recommend sad thing angry, which, like the lamb, will strengthen you. Pick it up.”— Natalie ShaperoEmma Jeremy is a British poet, born in Bristol. She is the author of Safety Behaviour (Smith|Doorstop, 2019) and a former winner of the New Poets Prize. Her poems have featured in publications such as Poetry London, Poetry Review and Magma. sad thing angry is her debut collection.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press Heterogeneous: 2016
Heterogeneous is the defnitive anthology of Anthony Anaxagorou s poetry - an extensive and revised selection taken from several previous volumes. The winner of the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award, Anaxagorou offers the reader an insight into his poetry career with work spanning from 2009 to 2016. These seven instructive years highlight the making of a poet who has now subsequently achieved international acclaim as a thinker, writer, polemicist and activist.
£10.00
Out-Spoken Press A Silence You Can Carry
A Silence You Can Carry stands as a searing debut collection from a startlingly brave new talent.The delicate and almost effortless poetry of Hibaq Osman blends everyday objects and movements into monumental invocations. The collection is filled with beautifully woven observations that are centered on love and loss, family relationships, identity and womanhood.
£6.41
Out-Spoken Press Contains Mild Peril
Contains Mild Peril is a book permeated by anxiety, not fatal threat, but the ambient manic hum of daily life. Precarity does something to us at the level of language; it shapes the ways we see and say. Our current climate – political, environmental, economic – engenders its own nervy music. These poems channel this collective apprehension in ways both deeply personal and instantly familiar. It is a collection that abounds in loss, in a sense of being lost, and in the gnawing fear of losing, yet its speakers address us with urgency. This is language in the throes of fighting back.
£10.00
Out-Spoken Press G&T
G&T is a pamphlet-length poem, exploring themes of queerness, sexuality and desire. Told through a series of anonymous encounters and relationships with older men, G&T moves between the anonymity of the early hours and the cold light of day. Taking us through drug and alcohol-fuelled nights with strangers, the poem questions the nature of desire, addiction and the sprawling and anonymous world of gay hookup culture, asking what we become when we agree to play roles for the benefit of other people.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Cane, Corn & Gully
Cane, Corn & Gulley is a genealogical and autobiographical collection which unites dance and poetry to observe, question and ruminate on what it means to adopt, perform, and pass down the notion of black West Indian femininity. Using labanotation and rhythm to analyse movement from Caribbean dances to movements carried out in everyday rituals, Kinshasa uses these motifs as a form of cartography for the poems.Cane, Corn & Gulley interrogates survival, sexual exploitation, race, gender, and class and invests in a unique discourse on the violence inflicted on the black female body (historically and presently). It explores the meaning of movement in oppressive ideological structures and serves to vindicate the rebellious acts of black women past, present and yet to come.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press apricot
Apricot is a devastating debut from one of the UK’s brightest and most fascinating poets, written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it through the weekend. Katie O’Pray’s is a highly articulate poetics, kicking against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache. These poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability, of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is a collection of singular quality.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press Down
Debut poetry collection by Rebecca McCutcheon.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press Tongueless
Set in the beating heart of Family, Rojbin Arjen Yigit's poems are both a questioning of the past and a mirror searching for future possibilities. Grappling with loss, the futility of language and the distances of countries, these poems are an accumulation of the speaker's struggles and senses. Interconnecting locales across generations, they set out what it means to belong and what it means to mean.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Dogtooth
Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment.It’s a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion. It’s about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press How You Might Know Me
How You Might Know Me is a poetic exploration of four women s lives, connected through their experience in different areas of the UK s growing sex industry. Written following years of workshops and Sabrina s own experience of working in strip-clubs, the collection represents a broad range of backgrounds, ethnicities, ages and political convictions. The characters of Sylvia, Tali, Sharifa and Darina bring challenging and often unexpected perspectives on their work and lives to the reader in electric free verse and quieter, traditional forms. Examining taboos, surprising sexual encounters, the politics of desire, the vastly differing viewpoints on sex work and most prominently, the status of women s equality in the UK today How You Might Know Me is certainly a fiery collection of poetry from one of the country s most exciting new writers.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press A Disbelief of Flesh
A Disbelief of Flesh holds a grief not just for the loved and lost, but one that comes with depth of identity, of culture, of faith.Christodoulou’s affection for her Cypriot heritage is channelled through her grandmother and grandfather, through food and the walls of home, and through her mother, whom she embodies sometimes, and who becomes a worshipped figure. We learn here of a tension that exists where pain meets catharsis, making possible a transformative connection with the roots of the self. This debut is a lesson in nuanced and poignant song.Maria-Sophia Christodoulou is a British born Cypriot working as an English Secondary School Teacher, Mental Health Advocate and Poet in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths with a BA and MA in English with Creative Writing, and Creative and Life Writing. She has since been published in Nascent by Out-Spoken Press, Away with Words by Toothgrinder Press and in Ink Sweat & Tears. Her work explores her dual-nationality within her identity and her search for acceptance within a feeling and state of ‘in-betweenness’.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Mutton Rolls
“Arji Manuelpillai hits the ground running with this debut and I freaking love it. His poems are funny, irreverent, hugely affecting. He’s fidgety, darts moment to moment – you’ll rush after him, then suddenly find he’s stopped, spun on his heel and you’re face-to-face with his good-natured grin. Manuelpillai will dial up the volume just to whisper something damn beautiful beneath its surface. Every page of Mutton Rolls is tasty, and announces by increment a highly enjoyable new voice.” — Wayne Holloway-Smith“The poems in this brilliant, playful debut are multifarious though gratifyingly interlinked, addressing the subjects of Sri-Lankan British identity, masculinity, friendship, grief and love. The tone is sometimes satirical, but there is no hiding behind satire in Arji Manuelpillai’s work – great tenderness and beauty characterise these poems, and the poet’s voice is completely original, entirely his own.” — Hannah Lowe
£7.62
Out-Spoken Press 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to my Father
54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father is the second pamphlet by British-born Irish poet Joe Carrick-Varty.“Atmospheric, suffused with the blue light of other people’s televisions, these poems, while often devastating, possess a tremendous warmth. Carrick-Varty takes an object/a loved one/a particular moment in time and carefully turns it over and over in his hands. This pamphlet is open-hearted, thoughtful — painfully, beautifully alive to the world and its strange specifics" — Ella Frears"Joe Carrick-Varty's poems don't need permission from anybody. Their exceptional and beautiful vulnerability is a permission all of its own. Each poem contained here demonstrates a mind completely awake to the sadnesses and risks of intimacy, and awake to finding an original vocabulary for articulating these things. A brilliant short collection. I'm utterly convinced of this poet's talent." —Wayne Holloway-Smith
£7.62
Out-Spoken Press State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation
How do we think of ourselves as poets? How does our race, our home(s), and our cultural heritage, shape our sense of belonging, our ways of seeing or experiencing the world? How can we learn from and offer support to each other? State of Play brings together conversations between an international line-up of poets, taking place over the course of a year, to offer rich insights into these questions and the ways a life lived in many places can invigorate one’s writing. With themes ranging from the sense of home and racialised expectations, to community and language, as well as the process of writing poetry, these creative discussions delve into the complexities and diversity of identity in the days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora.‘Multiple yet singular, the conversations here reveal the complexities of poetic language as a space of becoming rather than being, of identities sharply focusing under the weight of plurality, the forces of migration and the long tethers of home and empire. This book makes a critical intervention in the shaping of diasporic writing, turns us away from the outworn frameworks to demand bolder and more imaginative ways of reading. Let these conversations begin urgent ones elsewhere about how language is made and how it remakes us as global subjects speaking together.’ —Prof. Sandeep Parmar, Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Founder of Ledbury Critics of Colour.‘State of Play reminds us of the global reach of English-language poetry and poetics, whose production is not limited to the predominantly white Anglophone countries of the so-called West and reminds us of the ongoing legacies of British colonialism underlying even such seemingly neutral concepts as home, everyday life, and poetics.’ —Prof. Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry & convenor/co-founder of Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK)‘Giving voice to a diverse and multi-generational choir of distinctive voices, this anthology offers rare and intimate insights into the creative challenges of writing poetry now and the vital importance of dialogue as a free space for the play of ideas and critical thinking.’ —Prof. Susheila Nasta, Founder of Wasafiri, Magazine of International Contemporary Writing‘State of Play draws together a sparky and inspiring array of conversations between East and Southeast Asian poets situated across continents and borders. The different interactions are characterised by their commitment to exchange and reciprocity even where the poets meet for the first time only through the medium of these conversations. Editors Jennifer Wong and Eddie Tay have done a superb job of bringing together a rich spectrum of topics including nomadism, childhood, diaspora, race, belonging, the question of what it is to be creative, and all-important issues of language-choice and self-translation. I wager that no reader interested in poetry will not find excitement in this vibrant anthology.’ —Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford
£13.99
Out-Spoken Press A Greek Verse for Ophelia and Other Poems: Giovanni Quessep
A Greek Verse for Ophelia and Other Poems contains one hundred poems taken from renowned Colombian poet Giovanni Quessep’s entire oeuvre, including his last published book of poetry, Abyss Unveiled. The poems contained have been selected by his translators Felipe Botero Quintana, Ranald Barnico and the poet himself to launch the introduction of both the magnificent and exuberant world of his art to English-speaking readers of poetry. This collection is designed to provide its reader with an insight into the wealth and complexity of Colombia’s culture, a country whose history of violence and political corruption has often been over-simplified by the international media, including film and television industries. In the work of one of its finest artists, the English-speaking public will have the opportunity to observe the fine threads that make up Colombian reality through the prism of marvel and incantation evoked by Quessep’s poetry.
£12.00
Out-Spoken Press flinch & air
Flinch & Air is a unique exploration of Asian female identity. Reflecting on culture, politics, language and society in and beyond Hong Kong, this is a book of remembrance, courage, resilience and sacrifice. Touching on the current Hong Kong mass demonstrations, the 2019 Extradition Treaty, and the stories of her female elders Flinch & Air positions Asian women at the centre of the page.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Lasagne
In Lasagne, acclaimed poet Wayne Holloway-Smith moves between internal and external landscapes with pace, panache and vulnerability. This short collection of poems is a defibrillator resurrecting a small part of the universe at each new twist: a silent scream rearranging the flowers in a window, the miracle of a near-dead cow sprung back to life and feeding orphans, tears coming at the speed of cars. When these poems hit, you hardly see it coming.
£6.41
Out-Spoken Press Trust Fall
Trust Fall is an exhalation of loss; a lean into frailty and bodily abandon. In the language of stomach and synapse, Gee maps a path towards accepting unwellness.These poems interrogate the role masculinity, capital and love can play when imposed upon by chronic illness. As each new movement writhes with pain, is abject with grief, it also sings of a deeper beauty to be found in being loved at one’s most vulnerable.William Gee is a poet from the West Country who lives with and writes about chronic illness. His debut pamphlet Rheuma (Bad Betty Press, 2020) was selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2020, and his work has appeared widely in publications including Poetry London and Tentacular and on BBC Radio 4.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Today Hamlet
New pamphlet by Natalie Shapero. Natalie Shapero is author of poetry collections POPULAR LONGING, HARD CHILD, shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and NO OBJECT, winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Nude as Retrospect
In his arresting debut pamphlet, Alex Marlow asks what desire and longing look like in the 21st century. Nude as Retrospect is an exploration of contemporary intimacy examined through the lens of family, queerness, sex, and mental health. These are poems that position connection as the root of human want, while straddling the gaps between what we have and what we can get.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Boiled Owls
Debut poetry collection by Azad Sharma, exploring drug addiction, relapse and recovery.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press Bark Archive Splinter
Poetry pamphlet by Jay Gao, whose debut poetry collection Imperium (Carcanet Press, UK, 2022) is a winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Propel An Anthology of New Poetry
Discover the best new poetry from emerging voices across the UK and Ireland in the Propel Anthology, featuring selected poems from Propel Magazine Issues 112 (202224). Propel focuses on poets yet to publish a first full collection, with each issue edited by a renowned poet, Propel offers a window into the diverse poetries currently thriving in the UK and Ireland. Editor-in-Chief: Anthony Anaxagorou. Issue Editors: Mary Jean Chan, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Rebecca Tamás, Jack Underwood, Alycia Pirmohamed, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Pascale Petit, Harry Josephine Giles, Fran Lock, Inua Ellams, Ian McMillan and Tishani Doshi. Contributors include: Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Sanah Ahsan, Isabelle Baafi, Eve Ellis, Livia Franchini, Yanita Georgieva, Elontra Hall, Natalie Linh Bolderston and S. Niroshini.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press To Sweeten Bitter
After the death of his father, Raymond returns to Jamaica but restless questions begin to unearth inside him (Who I am now is something I need to remember). Upon returning to the UK Raymond travelled to Bristol, Liverpool, Hastings, Hull and around London to meditate in the places where the pain and grief of history is bigger than his own.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects
"what should i tell you? that feral will not enrich you. that feral will not be mastered. feral is ‘wild’ without utility. it offers nothing, and it asks for nothing in return."In this uncompromising collection of lyric essays, T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Fran Lock pulls us with her into the vortex of the ‘feral’. From medieval bestiaries to Poundland, Edmund Spenser to X-Ray Spex, in Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects Lock explores and eviscerates historical and cultural links between animality and otherness in contexts ranging across class, gender, queerness and Irishness. Overflowing with ‘strange rigour’ and a rage that is ‘tempering hope’ Lock excavates the ways feral is at once both trap and means of liberation.‘Fran Lock is our savvy sc/avenging angel, undoing the curse of racial capitalism’s stranglehold on language and meaning. Mattering out of place, Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects is endlessly errant, reminding us that writing is “a verb, not a noun,” immersive, propulsive and absolutely extra. Every line is so alive, so completely itself, it leaps from the page to flare bright & huge as graffiti on every wall until they fall.’ — So Mayer
£13.99
Out-Spoken Press Songs My Enemy Taught Me
Songs My Enemy Taught Me is a collection of back alley poetry and flick knife tales detailing women's struggle against sexual terrorism and colonisation. Songs of independence. Songs of survival. Songs of uprising. Comprised of poetry, text messages, landays, letters and news flashes these are stories plucked from women's lips across the globe and re-imagined by award-winning poet, playwright, and author Joelle Taylor. Some stories are her own. Others are yours.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press The Games
The Games is a book of play with language. In Scots and English, it mucks about with sound poetry, found poetry, computer-generated poetry, dirty poetry and others ways to blur and bust the borders of genre. Its themes are ecology, power and sex: how can you have fun in a system that's trying to take power away from you? The Games makes and breaks rules in an effort to live a full life in a full world.
£8.99
Out-Spoken Press EPIPHANEIA
‘They say birds always find their way back home but home is a nowhere — a memory; a never was.’Set in the immediate aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, the most catastrophic storm to strike the British Virgin Islands, Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia stands as a collection of rich, transcendental verse. Beyond the loss and devastation that such a natural disaster brings, Georges’ ideas span beyond the physical world, asking us to consider the ways in which families and communities come together amidst such tragedy.
£11.99
Out-Spoken Press Dog Woman
This startlingly original debut delves into the surreal, concealed moments of a young womanhood. Helen Quah’s voice is in part a deep-calling into the complex distances between mother and daughter, in part a twisted venture into the contradictions of romance. Dog Woman, named after the series of artworks by Paula Rego, contorts language, opening up a playfully dark and often humorous space of the fantastical and otherwise unexplained.
£7.62
Out-Spoken Press Mother of Flip-flops
Mukahang Limbu's reputation as a key voice in a new generation of poets has been gathering momentum across a number of years, and its brilliance is captured here in his debut publication. Mother of Flip-Flops is a queering of migrant experience, a love song to the mother, a celebration and questioning of the self. Defiant and shifting, these poems articulate a unique coming-of-age, and what it means to do so with a heightened exchange of empathy.
£8.23
Out-Spoken Press Caviar
Associative, sensuous, and unstable, Caviar explores the line between decadence and depravity. In Fletcher’s third pamphlet, investigations of power and violence are no longer limited to the domestic and romantic. She interrogates all dark spheres of influence: ‘A word. A woman hit. A nuclear bomb.’ Language is ‘consumed and mated’, a ‘divine bistro’ that shows her mastery over form. With winking intelligence and playful sleaze, this pamphlet is a circus of swans, slapped faces, and the snottiest, most expensive delicacy in the world.
£9.00
Out-Spoken Press Seder
The innovative debut collection from Adam Kammerling, Seder is an archived and deft account of a person reckoning with their heritage and family history. Hybrid, dexterous and informed, Kammerling retraces his Jewish heritage back to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, as poems fluctuate through time and space, leaving us with a forbidding sense that what has changed over recent decades is not enough.
£10.00
Out-Spoken Press Titanic
In this debut pamphlet, acclaimed poet Bridget Minamore explores the sensibilities surrounding love, loss, and the subsequent struggles we all face at some point in our relationships. Themed around a series of popular songs and a certain sinking ship, Minamore riffs from poem to poem with a choice selection of humorous and somber verse.
£6.41
Out-Spoken Press Stage Invasion: Poetry & the Spoken Word Renaissance
Award-winning poet Pete "the Temp” Bearder presents the unwritten history, science and skill of spoken word. Stage Invasion answers some strangely unaddressed questions: How was the live art of spoken verse kicked out of the Kingdom of Poetry? What is the history of the art form? How does emotional contagion happen in live performance? What has spoken word got to do with hypnotism and ecstatic states? This groundbreaking book explores a thriving ecology of artistry, and how it can serve us for cultural, social and political renewal.
£10.00
